Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Record spending in the cloud & colo market continued in the third quarter and it is now forecast to top $1.4 billion worldwide for the year 2018 -- almost a 50% spending increase over 2017, according to the most recent Optical Customer Markets Report issued by networking equipment and component market research firm Cignal AI.

Some highlights in the 3Q18 Optical Customer Markets Report:

Cloud & colo operators continue to be the fastest growing market in optical networking, with double-digit year-over-year growth in North America and EMEA and triple-digit growth in APAC in the third quarter.

Ciena led equipment vendor market share for cloud & colo with over 40% share in the third quarter and over 30% share for the last 12 months combined. Huawei and Cisco tied for second place in the third quarter followed closely by a combined Infinera/Coriant.

Despite incumbent spending growing at less than 2% year over year worldwide, incumbent spending in APAC grew 10% and represented over 35% of the total optical market in the third quarter.

Incumbent spending growth in APAC is expected to decelerate in 2019 as double-digit growth cannot continue indefinitely for such a large market. Incumbent spending in North America is expected to continue to decline as capital spending is focused on mobility and switched backhaul deployments.

Cable MSO optical spending continued to grow at a moderate pace into the third quarter, led by double-digit growth in North America to support fiber deep architectures.

“The slowdown in cloud & colo spending during 2017 ended with a return to record growth in 2018,” said Scott Wilkinson, Lead Analyst for Optical Hardware at Cignal AI. “While incumbent operator spending is still dominant, especially in Asia, cloud & colo spending growth is becoming more influential on the market.”

Cignal AI’s Optical Customer Markets Report is issued quarterly and quantifies optical equipment sales to five key customer markets – incumbent, wholesale, cable MSO, cloud and colo, and enterprise and government. The current report includes results through 3Q18 including detailed equipment vendor market share for sales to cloud operators. Regional forecasts based on expected spending trends by customer market are also included.

AT&T and Nokia are collaborating on an open software platform under the ORAN Alliance to open up access to 5G radio access networks (RANs). The goal is faster, more flexible service deployments and programmability within a rapidly-evolvable RAN. The ORAN Alliance aims to enable a multi-vendor open ecosystem of interoperable components for the disaggregated RAN.

AT&T said it is commencing development of a software platform for the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), to enable the creation of open source software that is aligned with the O-RAN target architecture. AT&T and Nokia are co-creating the platform code to accelerate the deployment of open source software for the 5G RAN.

“We’re delighted to work with Nokia on co-creating an open source implementation of the RIC platform to accelerate innovations and interoperability in the RAN,” said Mazin Gilbert, vice president of advanced technology and systems at AT&T Labs. “We continue to look for opportunities to drive open platforms and open interfaces in the community."

“Nokia is a strong proponent of RAN network openness and has been active in numerous open source communities, contributing code and defining open interface specifications,” said Mike Murphy, CTO for North America, Nokia. “We are excited to be partnering with AT&T to co-create RIC software and share with the open-source community to foster further collaboration and innovation.”

Some highlights:

The RIC platform will provide a set of functions and interfaces that allow for increased optimizations through policy-driven closed loop automation

The platform will be architected in the form of an extensible real-time microservices framework coupled with a radio information database and key open control plane interfaces for mobility management, spectrum management, load balancing, radio resource control and RAN slicing to name a few.

Implementations of these functions, sourced from multiple vendors, could be mixed and matched on a single network infrastructure.

The platform will also enable interfaces to third-party applications for enhanced mobility functions such as cross layer optimization and machine learning inferences.

AT&T also plans to increase its engagement in Akraino Edge Stack, a Linux Foundation project focused on building production ready cloud infrastructure for edge deployment in open source. In particular, AT&T has also signed a multiyear co- development agreement with Nokia to further expand Akraino Edge Stack capabilities supporting the needs of the RIC and other edge cloud platform deployments.

At its recent meeting at Mobile World Congress Shanghai, the O-RAN Alliance also elected Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs, as chair of the Board. In addition, Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Strategy & Technology Innovation at Deutsche Telekom, was appointed as Operations Officer; and Bharti Airtel, China Telecom, KT, Singtel, SK telecom, Telefonica, and Telstra were approved as new Board members. This expands the number of Board Directors to 12.

The Akraino Edge Stack project, which promises new levels of flexibility to scale edge cloud services quickly, has moved from formation into execution as a project hosted by The Linux Foundation. The project originated inside AT&T.

Akraino Edge Stack seed code will be opened up to the community this week based on AT&T’s seed code, (the Network Cloud blueprint,) contributed to The Linux Foundation.

“Since forming earlier this year, the Akraino Edge Stack project has generated strong industry support and is now well-positioned to create blueprints optimized for various edge use cases,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking and Orchestration, The Linux Foundation. “We are pleased to welcome leading members with a broad swath of edge expertise and resources to collaborate on improving the state of open source edge software.”

“We welcome the new members to the Akraino Edge Stack project. As a community, we can expand the development of next gen zero-touch edge cloud infrastructure for carrier and enterprise networks, and foster a new ecosystem of applications that demand high performance, ultra-low latency and blazing speed,” said Mazin Gilbert, vice president of Advanced Technology & Systems, AT&T. “Embracing open interfaces and collaboration with edge computing will expedite new solutions and innovations for 5G services.”

“While other companies have taken the same emulation approach we have to providing a MongoDB compatible service, nobody has built the unique, distributed, fault-tolerant, highly scalable, self-healing storage system that AWS has to work seamlessly with MongoDB,” said Shawn Bice, Vice President, Non-Relational Databases at AWS. “To meet developers’ needs, we looked at multiple different approaches to supporting MongoDB workloads and concluded that the best way to improve the customer experience was to build a new purpose-built document database from the ground up, while supporting the same MongoDB APIs that our customers currently use and like. This effort took more than two years of development, and we’re excited to make this available to our customers today.”

MaxLinear is working with Intel on the home gateway designs supporting 10 Gigabit Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 (FDX) cable services.

Specifically, MaxLinear is currently developing a new front-end SoC for these platforms based on its patented Full-Spectrum Capture (FSC) technology that includes diagnostic and spectrum management capabilities. The front-end will include high-speed connectivity to Intel’s next-generation gateway SoC. Intel’s SoC will offer powerful computing and networking performance and is architected for a wide range of WAN, LAN and WLAN use cases to help MSOs achieve optimal performance and improve Quality of Service (QoS).

MaxLinear said its IC, along with Intel’s next-generation gateway SoC, will be highly optimized to provide the greatest level of integration while maintaining system design flexibility to support future evolution of implementations. The modular nature of this solution ensures a simple, non-disruptive, path to potential future DOCSIS standards. Samples of the MaxLinear chips and reference designs are expected in the second half of 2019. Mass production is targeted for 2020.

“10 Gigabit and symmetrical performance are the next wave of services needed in broadband and FDX is a significant step forward for home connectivity,” said Will Torgerson, Vice President & General Manager of the MaxLinear Broadband Group.

“The growing number of devices, large amounts of data and immersive experiences in the home are going to require 10 Gigabit connectivity that deliver faster speeds and more capacity,” said WK Tan, Vice President and General Manager, Intel’s Connected Home Division. “That is why Intel, the cable industry, and companies such as MaxLinear, are working together to deliver cutting-edge 10 Gigabit technologies to power tomorrow’s ultra-connected homes.”

“The T-Mobile team delivered our best customer results ever in Q4 2018 and we did it in a competitive climate while working hard to complete our merger with Sprint,” said John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile. “That's 23 quarters in a row where more than 1 million customers have chosen T-Mobile - along with a postpaid phone churn result that's below 1%. These customer results speak volumes about our company, our network and our brand!"

The new device, which is compatible with a range of sub-6GHz bands focused on 5G mobile communication systems, offers a power efficiency rating of above 40%. The company says the amplifier will reduce the power consumption of mobile base stations.
Key features:

1024 quadrature amplitude modulation mode (1024-QAM): increases throughput in Wi-Fi devices by encoding more data in the same amount of spectrum

Target wake time (TWT): significantly improves battery life in Wi-Fi devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices

“Wi-Fi 6 delivers features to satisfy users’ evolving connectivity needs and to enable more efficiency in the expanding places where users rely on Wi-Fi,” said Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO, Wi-Fi Alliance. “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 continues a nearly 20-year history of providing standards-based, interoperability testing to ensure Wi-Fi devices meet expectations for quality and interoperability.”

Gemalto has integrated its embedded SIM (eSIM) for AT&T into its Cinterion LTE-M IoT module;

The new solution streamlines development for OEMs and reduces the cost and complexity of IoT deployment by eliminating the need for SIM card integration after manufacturing.

eSIMs also help maintain the strongest security levels with continuous security updates for the long life of IoT solutions. Samples of the new module are available with volume shipping to follow shortly.

Lexar announced its Professional 633x SDXC™ UHS-I card with 1 terabyte (1TB) of memory.

The Class 10 card offers read speeds of up to 633x (95MB/s).

“Almost fifteen years ago, Lexar announced a 1GB SD™ card. Today, we are excited to announce 1TB of storage capacity in the same convenient form factor. As consumers continue to demand greater storage for their cameras, the combination of high-speed performance with a 1TB option now offers a solution for content creators who shoot large volumes of high-resolution images and 4K video,” said Joey Lopez, Senior Marketing Manager.